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2011 – 2012

Cave In

In a difficult era for unconceited, forthright rock, Wild Flag has seized an opportunity to act as a bantam foil to the wealth of snobbery that permeates almost every facet of modern alternative culture. In doing so, this infant group of alternative rock and riot grrrl veterans has also created something of an archetype for those who care not to weight marketability over substance or who simply want a balance of the two. Unlike similar-sounding bands who resign themselves to aping banal classic rock n’ roll conventions (practically guaranteeing creative bankruptcy), on their debut Wild Flag ape nothing and are derivative of no one, not even of themselves. Instead, the album plays like a flexile run-through of song sketches Mary Timony and Carrie Brownstein casually brought to Janet Weiss and Rebecca Cole knowing vaguely how they’d sound, but also knowing that everyone in the room was on precisely the same page. It’s in that lack of pretension – that unassuming, spontaneous perfection found in every crevice of this album – that Wild Flag becomes the artifact of a band operating at a level akin to the Rolling Stones circa Aftermath. And that’s only fifty percent of the reason this is the best album of 2011; in the other fifty percent are ten songs raw with confidence, subtle ingenuity and infectious self-referential joy.

An odd, though accurate, measure of Black Flag’s legacy is the pedigree of talent the band kicked out during its ten year run. Nevertheless, through that atypical lens, 2011 has been something of a pinnacle for the long-defunct hardcore punk pioneers: third bassist Chuck Dukowski has recently teamed up with Oxbow front man Eugene Robinson to form a pseudo-tribute t0 his wealth of unreleased My War era material – farcically named Black Face – while original Black Flag vocalist Keith Morris has gone light years beyond mere throwback or nostalgia with supergroup Off! to the point of revising the last fifteen underground years of hardcore by galvanizing listeners with minute-bursts of demurely-produced aggressive stimulation clocking in at a total running time of eighteen minutes – just short enough to avoid fatiguing said listeners while they compulsively give ear teeth for more.

We’ve written enough flowery praise about Caddywhompus over the past year to fill a J. Peterman catalog, and we probably won’t stop until we can compile an entire bathroom reader devoted to this chameleonic Houston via New Orleans-based noise duo. Though their last two albums have been a combined entrada of jarring dissonance, chaotic mathcore and striking melody, with The Weight Caddywhompus suddenly no longer feel like an unpredictable helter-skelter of feedback, pedals and alloy (though Chris Rehm and Sean Hart have done nothing to abate their creative momentum); rather, using their past experimentation with noise pop as a stylistic shorthand that their audience is now well familiar with, the duo crafts their four best offerings to date – songs whose avant-garde freakouts and abrupt tempo changes don’t confuse as much as titillate, and whose pop sensibilities feel essential where they once could have sounded like a heavy-handed counterbalance to Caddywhompus’s weird streak.

Knowing that the songs found on this career-spanning retrospective are over a decade old did little to blunt the inexorable thrill of being able hear the terrifying chaos and impossible execution of this collection for the first time. Though I know little about the notoriously irreverent Jesuit or their controversial, unpredictable presence in the DIY hardcore scene of the mid-1990s, Discography – composed of one set of demos, one Black Sabbath cover and two immaculate Kurt Bellou-produced EPs – is a self-explanation of how Nate Newton and Brian Benoit – who would later go on to join Converge and the Dillinger Escape Plan respectively – are one of the most rousing guitar tandems of all time.

While early low-budget recordings by Mineral and the Promise ring have avoided the fate of being viewed as unfinished products or creative stepping stones by actually containing those bands’ best material, Cleveland-based songwriter Dylan Baldi – though not nearly far enough along in his career to be judged in those terms – brazenly toys with the compositional balance of those same types of lo-fi textures on Cloud Nothings. This generally wouldn’t have much meaning considering how popular digital recording technology has made such a practice, but when done right it can create an experience as memorable as it is initially off-putting. And though the band’s distinct emo pop and light punk stylings stick out like a sore thumb in 2011, it’s hard to imagine an album this year with more reverence for the musical climate surrounding it than Cloud Nothings.

Adopting a faddish facade of washed out, chillwave atmospherics, Common Era marks a noticeable shift in sound for Belong, whose debut October Language is still being talked about as an ambient kaleidoscope masterpiece. This sophomore release – while more accessible in that it contains drum machines, vocals and vaguely traceable song structures – is no less brilliant a piece of utilitarian art, capable of passively providing a soundtrack to a person’s every moment or thought – not as much as a demanding listening experience as it is an utterly captivating augmentation of reality.

It’s nearly impossible to gauge the merits of this album because almost nobody else in the country listened to the thing with an analytical ear. Having spent a decade equal times championed and panned by the mainstream, it’s no secret that Cave In‘s low-key release and marketing of White Silence was their purposeful design. As such, by placing such a critically overlooked record on a year end list, I seriously run the risk of coming off as either a shamelessly biased fanboy or one of the most deeply perceptive listeners of creative advancement today; but with the implausible, addictive textural dissonance that cult-status songwriter and producer Stephen Brodsky has found to envelope both the loud and soft on White Silence, I’m more than happy to be labeled the former.

This third-time-charmer from this previously scatterbrained, arguably lackluster Detroit noise band hits at the perfect time both for Human Eye and for upstart Sacred Bones Records, a label that has (so far) benefited more from quality under-the-radar releases like this than anyone may ever know. As the Joker to the Batman of labelmates The Men, Human Eye throws a kitchen sink of inanity – alien abduction balladry, illogical tempo changes, and a Jackson Pollack-esque canvas of engineered recording – at the listener that for the first time in the band’s seven-or-so year career engages like a tractor beam. They Came From The Sky is a sublime success both in spite of and because of its seemingly aimless pseudo-experimentation and wanton weirdness, bringing to mind the strange charm of Thin Lizzy’s Vagabonds of the Western World.

The uncorrupted modesty with which Wye Oak dispatches the material on Civilian will probably cause this Baltimore folk rock duo much critical neglect as the year concludes. For better or worse though, singer Jenn Wasner’s deceptively assured delivery and percussionist Andy Stack’s reserved yet subtly precise accompaniment are what set Wye Oak apart from every band around them. Unafraid to shake a stereo with Sonic Youth-inspire feedback where bourgeois folk artists lend themselves to pretentious technical exhibitionism, and conservative with that earsplitting noise where others can’t resist the urge to bog themselves down in sonic masturbation, perhaps no band in 2011 came closer to perfecting alternative rock’s loud/soft dynamic than Wye Oak have on Civilian.

Not since the Brian Jonestown Massacre in the mid-1990s has a band managed to build its catalog as quickly or effortlessly as Portugal. The Man. However, where the aforementioned Massacre failed to truly make count its big opportunity to move from the psychedelic flophouse to the record industry big leagues, Portugal has made a rare, risky – and arguably successful – transition from indie to major with In the Mountain In the Cloud, delivering for Atlantic Records not their most stylistically out-of-the-box record to date, but certainly their most consistent. While this may not seem like much of an achievement on paper and may even lose the band some indie cred, it’s worth keeping in mind that Jawbox made the same transition to Atlantic in 1994 and offered up a similarly streamlined album that is now considered one of the best of that decade.

Though modern rock, by design, employs at least a moderate amount of teamwork between band members, true democracy in the post-2000 indie rock world tends to conspicuously defy the norm. In actual practice, you’re much more likely to hear a band claim a collaborative spirit (The Strokes’ most recent piecemeal effort, Angles, for instance) than you are to actually hear the sounds of multiple congruent songwriters so intrinsically-linked that every piece of music demands equal input from each party. That’s part of the reason White Silence, a one-off album by the damn-near defunct Massachusetts aggressive rock chameleons Cave In, is such a stunning surprise.

It’s difficult to say this was the album Cave In needed to make, especially when the band’s members have spent the past seven years apparently not caring whether they work together, enjoy a flourishing career, or continue to be labeled as the creative trailblazers they were thought to be for a couple of months at the end of the 1990s. Jilted by broken corporate promises and underwhelming album sales of the alt-rock head-in-the-clouds opus Antenna, the band left RCA Records and released Perfect Pitch Black, a lipsticked collection of demos that haphazardly – albeit with good intentions – attempted to reestablish the bite of their earlier metalcore records. Cave In seemed all but totally disbanded, with individual members branching off to make at least ten albums in the form of solo projects and new bands that, at times, produced better music than both Antenna and Perfect Pitch Black combined. 2009’s Planets of Old EP, though a welcome reminder of Cave In’s existence, did little to help the situation. Attempting to give fans both the frictionless vocals of Stephen Brodsky and the guttural scream of bassist Caleb Scofield, it came off just as forced as the two albums before it. At that point, any fan, follower, or bona fide detractor of the band had good reason to lack confidence in Cave In’s ability to be the forward-thinking visionaries they once seemed to be.

White Silence, then, should completely astound any of those doubters, as it manages to give everyone both nothing and everything they’ve ever wanted from the band. Unpredictably revolving through singing, screaming and yelling, while seamlessly throwing together crushing guitar sludge, pounding hardcore drums, the occasional black metal suite, and a witches brew of Electro Harmonix-processed rock n’ roll solos, the album’s only common thread (possibly best embodied in thrash hodgepodge “Centered”) is a jagged layer of brutal dissonance and sensationally wanton texture experimentation that inexplicably seals Cave In’s most organic record to date.

The album finds its keynote only three songs in with “Sing My Loves”, a groove-heavy piece whose jaw-dropping double guitar crunch perfectly jives with a rhythm section straight out of a messy Judas Priest drum take until unfolding into a soaring, smoothly-harmonized arena rock climax and denouement. The band continues its stride through a series of Converge-quality off-the-wall screamers until bringing the album’s breakneck speed to a halt with “Summit Fever”, a mountain-climbing pound of doom that builds on Cave In’s career-spanning theme of oxygen loss and suffocation. After which, the remainder of White Silence seems intent on lulling the listener into a state of peaceful reflection.

Closer “Reanimation” may be one of the only songs here that overtly belongs to one of the band’s members. Beginning with minimalist guitar picking reminiscent his most recent solo effort Here’s To The Future, Stephen Brodsky’s crudely rudimentary – yet always refreshingly straightforward – lyricism brings the gradual cooling of the album’s intensity to a muted, heavy breath before the rest of the band reappears for a beautiful and sprawling conclusion that adds a strange symmetry to a record that began on series of violently black notes.

Again, it isn’t necessarily the case that Cave In needed to make this album, as they’ve carefully curated for themselves an environment in which time apparently stands still and eight years between proper albums is a non-issue. Nevertheless, White Silence is that album; one that sounds and feels like it was recorded by a group of brand new musicians with an entirely original take on creating music. Obviously, the members of Cave In are anything but new. More appropriately, this is the refocusing of a band that was at one time in danger of falling victim to the vice of creative apathy and its own ingrained predilection for bucking mainstream recording industry conventions. Instead, they’ve centered their hyper-evolved (or is it “supremely antiquated”?) idea of what a band should be and made an album that serves to both validate their ceaseless genre-shifting and affirm their earlier praise as artistic innovators.